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Category: Versions

Slow-Rolling Patches

Published 2022-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Stuart tends to end up on the late adopter side of things:

My experience of SQL upgrades is that they tend to be largely dictated by neccessity, either of the ‘the Security team is getting really twitchy about these old servers’ or ‘crap, it’s license renewal time and the vendor doesn’t support x’ variety. I’ve never performed one that wasn’t under some sort of pressure. How do we get here?

Click through for the downsides of really slow adoption. The biggest problem is that you’re trading current convenience for future pain when slow-playing adoption, as Alex mentions.

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Upgrade Strategies

Published 2022-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri discusses upgrading:

When I started my first job as a DBA seven years ago, my project was to migrate several SQL Servers and all the servers were in SQL Server 2000. In my first SQL class at my school, I started my learning with SQL Server 2012. It was a shock to me to work on SQL 2000 databases at the time (as I am not familiar with the SQL Server 2000 yet), especially as it was my first job as a DBA.

My first project was to migrate approximately two hundred and fifty SQL 2000 SQL Servers to SQL Server 2012/2016. It took us a couple of years to successfully migrate all these Servers.

Deepthi mentions fear as a demotivating factor. In fairness, fear is a valid response to upgrades for two separate reasons: first, because the changes they release might break your existing code (something very common in the data science world); and second, because new code has new bugs that you haven’t discovered or worked around yet.

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Physical Read Double-Counting in Query Stats

Published 2022-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

David Alcock reviews the latest SQL Server 2019 cumulative update:

Microsoft recently released Cumulative Update 15 for SQL Server 2019. It contains a bunch of fixes and some improvements, I get a bit geeky with updates like this and love to have a look through the different fixes to see “Physical reads for read-ahead reads are counted incorrectly (two times) when you run queries. Therefore, the information in sys.query_store_runtime_stats and sys.dm_exec_query_stats shows incorrect values.”

Read on to see what this means and a quick test to see if it works as expected.

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The Benefits of Indirect Checkpoints

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand explains why it’s probably a good idea to enable indirect checkpoints:

At Stack Overflow, the upgrade to SQL Server 2019 was not as smooth as expected. It introduced long recovery times and high CPU on a secondary, during synchronization activity after failover, patching, and network connectivity testing. This symptom wasn’t present during similar activities and workloads under SQL Server 2017.

Aaron points out that if you have databased created in older versions of SQL Server, enabling indirect checkpoints can provide a performance boost to certain activities around log writing., including backup times.

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Cleaning SQL Express Databases

Published 2021-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill knows the pain:

I was contacted by a lawyer that was using a 3rd party application to store emails, keep track of time, etc.

The backend of the application is SQL Server Express edition, which has a hard limit of 10GB for the data file.

One quick note for people with lots of LOB data, remember to reorganize with LOB_COMPACTION = ON as that’s the only way to be sure. Also, depending on how old the version of SQL Server is, there was a bug with LOB compaction which affected SQL Server 2014 and earlier. But, uh, hopefully you’re patched past that point…

Also, getting up to 2016 SP1 means that Express Edition gets data compression. It wouldn’t directly help in this case, but if you have a lot of non-LOB data on Express Edition, it can work wonders, for some definition of “wonders.” After all, if you’re using Express Edition, wonders are by definition pretty small.

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SQL Server 2022 and Big Releases

Published 2021-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar opines on an interesting topic:

The question, posed by Brent’s Tasty Beverage (nicely done) was:

My friends feel announcement from MS regarding SQL22 were only relatively small changes (since we didn’t see too much of multiple plans technically or demo), nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary. What are your thoughts?

Read on for Brent’s thoughts. I’ll say that I’m still expecting a few smaller surprises to come in as we get closer to CTPs.

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Ignite Announcements

Published 2021-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra has a round-up of Ignite 2022 announcements:

 Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra: Is now GA. Cassandra is an open source, column family store NoSQL database. The Azure Cassandra service includes an automatic synchronization feature that can sync data between with customers’ own Cassandra instances, on-premises and elsewhere. More info

Wolfgang Strasser has some thoughts as well on what Ignite has shown us so far:

As you might have noticed, Azure Purview is one of my newest friends in Azure Data town. During Ignite, the support for Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), the Data Lake Data Asset Access Governance, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integration with Azure Purview was announced.

What I really look forward to test is the Data Asset Access Governance for Data Lake storages. Imagine a world that allows you to define permission on a central place and those permissions are brought to a storage account / system of your choice..

Read both of them for two different perspectives.

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SQL Server 2022 Preview Announced

Published 2021-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Carlin ends our long national nightmare:

SQL Server 2022 integrates with Azure Synapse Link and Azure Purview to enable customers to drive deeper insights, predictions, and governance from their data at scale. Cloud integration is enhanced with disaster recovery (DR) to Azure SQL Managed Instance, along with no-ETL (extract, transform, and load) connections to cloud analytics, which allow database administrators to manage their data estates with greater flexibility and minimal impact to the end-user. Performance and scalability are automatically enhanced via built-in query intelligence. There is choice and flexibility across languages and platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Kubernetes.

Click through for a quick overview of what’s making its way into the product.

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